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Simmy Awards
Overview The Simmy Awards (also called the SIMMYs) are an annual music award show sponsored by the American Recording Academy and televised on STV. The nominees and winners are chosen by votes and only people within the industry who create music (artist, producers, songwriters, engineers, etc.) are allowed to vote with roughly 15,000 participating each year. The honor of winning an award is highly regarded, winning a general category is held to an even higher regard. Categories The general categories for the SIMMYs from most prestigious to the least prestigious is: Album Of The Year, Song Of The Year, Record Of The Year, and Best Male/Female Artist. Other sub categories are separated by genre of music including Pop, R&B/Hip-Hop, Dance, Classical, Mixing/Engineering and so on. Voting Music creators voting for the nominees and winners are only allowed to vote within their respective genre. All voters are allowed to vote for the general categories. Before voting for nominations takes place, the American Recording Academy makes a list of possibilities base on their restriction for qualification. All votes are treated as equal, that is artist don't hold more merit than engineers, and are counted and totaled to find the winners. In the event of a tie, there is a re-vote between the final two between ARA members. Qualifications To qualify for each respective category a song, album, or artist needs to meet certain requirements set by the ARA. For example, to qualify for Album Of The Year, "the album must be certified gold and have charted within the top 10 of the US Sims Billboard Album 200 chart at anytime the year prior." The time frame songs/albums must be released between in January 1st to December 31st to qualify for that calendar year. Albums and song may not be nominated twice. Subcategories have their own unique criteria for nomination, for instance, to be nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album, "the album has to have appeared on the US Sims Billboard Album 200 chart the year prior and to have spawned a single that appeared on the US Pop Airplay chart." Controversy The Simmy Awards have had a fair amount of controversy. Most notably, the music duo Destiny's Reach was nominated for Best Duo/Group at the 1992 Simmy Awards and won only later to find out that the pair had been using ghostwriters, session singers, and did not clear any samples used in their work. Because they had no creative merit, the ARA revoked their SIMMY and gave it to the runner-up, Diabolic. Other major controversy started when the lines of genre specific voting were blurred. Some artist would be limited to voting only in the pop categories or only the R&B/Hip-Hop categories even though the two genres began to overlap in the early 2000s. The ARA stuck to their guidelines but when popular hip-hop songs began to top the Pop Airplay chart the Pop and Urban categories became homogeneous with many pop oriented artists being snubbed. Eventually the guidelines were changed so that where ever the song charted first was the category it would fall under. In the event a song debut on both pop and urban airplay the same week, the ARA would find the best fit accordingly.